A Christian look at contemporary and classic literary fiction and culture

Thursday, July 4, 2013

Orwell's "1984": The Kingdom of Big Brother Is Within You

George Orwell’s “1984” is a
best seller again, thanks to revelations of government surveillance and the
perpetually American belief that there is a movement afoot to subvert the
nation. This instinct is one we inherited from the Founding Fathers, and it has
largely served us well. It keeps large scale political movements from holding
onto power longer than a generation. We get suspicious easily, and in Orwell’s
20th century novel of totalitarianism, we have a brilliant story
that caters to our fears, entertains us, and at the same time confirms our
darkest suspicions.

Like many of my generation,
my first exposure to the novel was in the year “1984,” when western democracy
took the book off the shelf, looked around the landscape, and patted itself on
the back when it did not see a figure comparable to Big Brother. But Orwell
wasn’t necessarily interested in giving us a blueprint for how an all-encompassing
dictatorship might happen if (or when) it does – his work’s power lies not in
its ability to anticipate those fears to their logical conclusion. Instead, he
may have inadvertently stumbled onto the logical end, not of totalitarianism,
but unlimited freedom.

In “1984,” Oceania exists
because of a great war, which has wiped away the previous governing powers and
replaced them with an emergency government. The regime must have a perpetual crisis
in order to continue its existence. The nation is ruled by a charismatic
leader, and certain kinds of conduct are forbidden in order that the state
survives. Citizens are constantly watched for disobedience (not only by a secret
police but by each other), and that vigilance later escalates into a search for
mere unorthodoxy at every level. Class or individual distinctions are seemingly
wiped out in order to blend everyone together, and technology is used to keep
the state in a position of power. Scarcity and want are repackaged as privilege
and prosperity. History is controlled, even language is controlled, and there
is always an enemy who must be defeated. There is enough here to make the
easily fearful on either the left or the right in 2013 America suspicious.

Winston Smith’s life has been
copied in various works of dystopia that followed – there is a minor character
who mimics the rhetoric of the leader. There is a forbidden book that hints at
another way. The hero is allowed to entertain the idea that the world might be
rescued, or at least, his world. And that world turns at the moment the hero
asks the unthinkable question, “Am I happy?”

Thomas Pynchon points out
that one of the parlor games of “1984” is looking at the current landscape of
this or that society and pointing to what Orwell got right, and what he didn’t
anticipate. We have to remember that Orwell didn’t set out to write a
definitive critique of totalitarian communism – he was a far-left socialist.
What he was interested in was the ability of modern society and ideology to go
a long way in wiping out the ability of the individual to define himself. When
the novel opens, Winston Smith indulges in perhaps the most subversive thing he
can do, outside of his affair with Julia – he begins keeping a diary. Why is
this subversive? Because the individual cannot define events, or his own life,
in a state-controlled environment. That is the sole privilege of the ruling
power. What Oceania attempts to do is wipe out the individual, systemically at
first, and if that proves unsuccessful, eventually through torture and
brainwashing.

While Orwell got the
technological aspect of the “Big Brother” state correct – in its ability to
define the past and watch its citizens – there were a few things he didn’t even
bother worrying about in his pitch-black future. For example, ethnic tension
seems absent. The Party, we are told, has people of virtually every class in
its ranks and leadership. But any government that encompasses multiple
ethnicities and cultures will always feel tension, especially in the central
question of who is making the decisions. What Orwell needs for his dystopia to
work is a very docile populace, but he can get that, since he’s its creator.

Also absent is religion – any
religion. Instead, devotion is poured out to the state. It is a feature of
leftish visions of the future that religion is easily disposed of. The idea behind
it is that enlightenment rationalism will eventually triumph and people will
understand that the faiths they cling to are as vain as those of our ancient
ancestors. One paradox of totalitarian cultures has been that, no matter how
hard the state presses, the pressure tends to make faith even more passionate.
Christianity survived in Shogunate Japan for centuries despite the best efforts
of the executioner, and the church thrived in Communist China even in the
crucible of the Cultural Revolution. One can make a case that Christianity
surviving the Inquisition in any recognizable form is as much a facet of the
faith as the zealotry that inspired the evil in the first place. A completely
atheistic Oceania assumes a great deal of the people Winston Smith puts his
faith in – the proles. Faiths all over the world do not survive on the hopes of
intellectuals or party functionaries, but on the rank and file, the workers;
the people who make our societies, free and enslaved, work. The state, any and
all states, eventually prove themselves poor repositories of our dreams. The
closest the language of “1984” ever gets to religious devotion is during
O’Brien’s torture of Winston. Consider:

“The command of the old despotisms was ‘Thou shalt
not.’ The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt.’ Our command is ‘Thou
art.’”

Only later does O’Brien
inform Winston that “God is power.” By this time, the use of the word “God,”
even by the state torturer, seems utterly subversive.

But another faith is absent
from “1984,” and that is the defining characteristic of democracy, socialism,
communism and even fascism: faith in the inevitable triumph of human
civilization. All governments are based on narratives, and the stories they
tell must be hopeful in order to keep the population convinced of the state’s
viability. Think of any speech by any president – even Jimmy Carter’s notorious
“malaise” speech ends with a ridiculous flourish calling on Americans to say
something good about the country, and to renew the nation’s spirit. Orwell’s
vision of the future is not hopeful and does not end on a happy note – Winston
is happy, but he is happy because he has totally surrendered to Big Brother and
the idea of Big Brother. He knows that with this triumph, he no longer has to worry
about running afoul of the state. Think again of O’Brien’s words:

“The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very
close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their
own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized
power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there
lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like
that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing
it. Power is not a means; it is an end. … the object of power is power.”

At any moment in a democracy,
there are millions of people who feel out of power. They can respond in many
ways – contempt for the ruling party, belief in the opposition (or anger at its
powerlessness), pessimism that the current rulers are changing the country
beyond salvation, or optimism that the nation is too strong to be destroyed.
Indeed, there may be the temptation to feel all of these emotions
simultaneously. That is why “1984” continually finds enthusiastic readers, no
matter who is in power.

But the work is pliable
enough to give comfort and warning across the political spectrum. Take the
three slogans of the Big Brother regime – War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance
is Strength. If you do a quick Google search, you will find all three slogans
used ironically in blogs, tweets or postings against each of the last three
presidents of the United States.

Modern governments all over
the globe convince themselves that a constant state of preparation for war is a
deterrent to war, even as they are already engaged in war. The idea of finding
freedom in complete obedience is, curiously enough, a religious idea, borrowed
from Christianity with the state replacing the divine as the seat of devotion.
The third slogan is more pertinent to our time – the idea that not knowing the
whole truth, or even a partial truth, means that you rely totally on another to
tell you that which you need to know to survive. What should be frightening to
modern society is that, in our society which thrives on information technology,
such a thing is already happening.

Think about it – how many
people, on both left and right, rail against the news media for hiding the
truth about this or that issue? But when they look for information to back up
their opinions, they invariably turn to the same news media, which presumably
can’t hide everything from those clever enough to see through it. Ideologies
have now caught on to the idea that by having networks of bloggers, news
services, polling services and other information networks, they can perpetually
create a narrative that reinforces their beliefs, regardless of the facts. What
results is a society where people never recalibrate their ideas based on new
information, but instead explain away challenges as being extraordinary. Where
no one ever wins an election or an argument, because whoever wins is
illegitimate. Circumstances that might otherwise contradict their most closely
held beliefs are instead examples of how right they are. In “1984,” the
citizens engage routinely in conspiratorial thinking – trying to pick out the
real news behind the fake, and interpret the real aims behind this fact’s
prominence and that one’s obscurity. “What is the design behind the news? Where
are we headed? What don’t they want us to know?”

Orwell’s great fear is of a
society of automatons – incapable of thinking or feeling for themselves, eager
to believe whatever is fed to them and unconscious of a common past or future.
His great mistake was in probably believing the state was necessary to make
this happen. There are now more ways than ever before for human beings to
define themselves, a power that was unthinkable in the past. In modern society,
people can differentiate themselves by fashion, by material wealth, by speech,
by their sexual preference (and even their gender), by transcending class, by
gaining fame or infamy, and by isolating themselves from it all. There is
belonging available to virtually every role through communication. Every avenue
is available, with only a little effort and luck. This is what almost total
freedom looks like, on a scale even Orwell would have found unlikely.

But how many of your friends’
Facebook statuses look exactly the same? How many times do they share with you
the same images, videos, or faulty facts? How often do we dismiss a certain
piece of news because it does not fit into our neat ideological categories? How
many tweets do you read that seem like an untold number of other tweets? How
often do the same stale jokes clog up your phones from people who have all
convinced themselves they are original, funny, and utterly unique? The danger
of modern society may be not of automatons created by the state, but created by
the culture, who all look utterly alike while they are all the time convinced they
are different. Add to that an atmosphere of cynicism and irony, where even the
worst news about society gives us new fodder for snarky comments, an atmosphere
where history is dismissed as irrelevant, the product of a conspiracy. Where
people stay in barely defined roles or avenues handed to them by their politics
or culture because they do not believe there is any way to something else. Suddenly
you don’t need Big Brother watching you – “1984” is within you.

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Brilliant Disguises is maintained by William Thornton, a writer who works as a reporter at an Alabama newspaper. I am a deacon in a Southern Baptist Church and teach a Sunday School class. I am the author of "The Uncanny Valley" and "Brilliant Disguises."

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I'm a reporter with the Birmingham (Ala.) News and the Alabama Media Group. You can read my reporting at al.com. I'm a Southern Baptist deacon and the author of "Set Your Fields on Fire" - http://www.amazon.com/your-fields-fire-William-Thornton/dp/1512721964/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1452519478&sr=1-1&keywords=set+your+fields+on+fire+william+thornton. You would profit from buying and reading it, you know? I know I would. Email me at wthorn7@hotmail.com if you'd like.